Abby Hardy, 12, and her father Jeff Hardy Saturday 3/17/12. Kathy Hardy,Hardy's wife and Abby mother, was murdered in a horrific fire at their Branford home. Abby who was only 6 when her mother was murdered now knows many all the details. She wants to know why no one has been arrested in the case. Photo by Peter Hvizdak / New Haven Register

BRANFORD -- Three men allegedly plotted the 2006 arson murder of Kathy Hardy in a meeting days before the fire that killed the 39-year-old mother of three, someone who allegedly was there has told police, according to Hardy's family.

Two of the men at the alleged meeting, which family members say took place at DePalma's Apizza in East Haven, also allegedly showed up at the home of an East Haven woman the day of the fire, March 7, 2006, said Hardy's mother.

They gave the woman a ring that turned out to be Hardy's, asked her to hold onto it, told her they had just left Hardy's house after setting it on fire, and "that she was screaming when they left," said Hardy's mother, Bette Barrett of Clinton.

Hardy died of smoke inhalation during the morning fire at 27 Little Bay Lane, a densely-populated neighborhood in the Short Beach section.

Advertisement

Whoever set the blaze used an accelerant to torch the staircase that was Hardy's only means of escape from her second-floor bedroom, fire investigators have said.

Hardy's family, which has grown impatient with the pace of the six-year investigation, are revealing new details of what police have shared with them in hopes of forcing movement in the case.

A New Haven woman -- a felon with prior arrests for drugs and fraud -- was at Hardy's house the night before the fire. She somehow ended up with Hardy's credit card, cellphone and car key -- after also turning up at the scene a few hours after the fire broke out, according to family members and a police report.

The woman, who at the time lived in the Quinnipiac Terrace housing project on Front Street in New Haven, used the credit card soon after the murder, according to a police report obtained by Hardy's sister, Dawn Luddy, under the state Freedom of Information Act.

Yet police never searched the woman's house to see if anything else of Hardy's was there -- including her missing purse, which was never recovered.

And when they arrested the woman two days after the fire for allegedly stealing the credit card, they let a relative of the woman retrieve the card from her apartment rather than obtain a search warrant -- and charges ultimately were dropped, family members said.

Family members also revealed that "Kathy went to Florida on weekly occasions," said Luddy, 42, of Watertown. She is one of Hardy's three siblings, along with sister Jennifer Paul, 43, of Clinton, and brother Robert Barrett, 47.

"Kathy didn't have any extra money at all, so somebody was sending her there," Luddy believes, although she does not know who might have sent Hardy there -- or for what purpose.

Six years later, it doesn't get any easier for the family.

"I think the hardest thing for our family is the not knowing," said Hardy's mother. For years now, she has asked herself, "What did she know that made someone want to kill her?"

"It's almost like a fear that we're just never going to know," Bette Barrett said. "You don't want it to define your life -- but it does. There's not a day I wake up that I don't think of her."

While she's no longer convinced police will solve the case, "I certainly hope that it will be solved," Barrett said. "I think that with enough digging and enough investigation, somebody will slip up somewhere."

Hardy's children, Robert, now 16, Emily, 13, and Abigail, 12, live in Branford with their father, Jeff Hardy, who had been divorced from Kathy Hardy for three years and separated for four at the time of her death. He has since remarried.

The children, who the family once sheltered from the facts of what happened to their mother, now all know pretty much everything there is to know about it after growing curious as they grew older, said their father.

Branford Chief of Police Kevin Halloran and Detective Lt. William Carroll, who commands the detective bureau, would not comment on the case other than to say that it remains an active investigation and is by no means a "cold case."

"What I'm going to tell you is that we're going to continue to work on it," said Halloran. "I believe we are working on this case with the highest level of integrity and we are doing everything that we can to try and solve this case. We all want the same outcome."

"We are actively working on the case," said Carroll, who previously has said that a "prime suspect" was in federal prison. "We've made some progress and we're continuing to work on it. But we're not going to comment beyond that."

Carroll said last year that the main suspect is an East Haven man who was an associate of Hardy's, and that they have spoken to him about the crime previously. The man is serving a 10-year sentence in a New York federal prison for an incident in which he tried to sell cocaine to an FBI agent.

The man is one of the three people that Hardy's family says were involved in the meeting at DePalma's.

Asked specifically about the alleged meeting and the alleged incident involving the ring, Carroll said, "I can't comment. I just can't get into it. ... I'm not going to say it's true or not true."

With regard to the woman who ended up with Hardy's credit card, "We investigated that very thoroughly. ... That's all I'm going to say," Carroll said.

A $50,000 state reward for tips leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who took Hardy's life remains.

Anyone with information can call the Police Department's main number at (203) 481-4241 or a confidential tip line at (203) 315-3909.

Hardy's family is losing faith in the ability of police to solve the crime -- although they're not dropping their own efforts. At one point, they didn't speak to Branford police for six months, although family members attended a Board of Police Commissioners meeting in February, recently met with Halloran and Capt. Geoffrey Morgan and "we're trying to open up a line of communication with them again," said Luddy.

If anything, they are growing more aggressive in their drive to keep the pressure on and to keep Hardy's death on the front burner of area law enforcement agencies. That includes talking about some things that police previously had asked them not to discuss publicly.

Police "told us there was a meeting ... to talk about murdering Kathy and to talk about money," said Hardy's mother. "Money was exchanged."

Police believe they know who provided that money, although that person wasn't at the meeting, said Barrett and Luddy.

For months, the family took solace in what they thought was the fact that the case was going to be shared with the state's special cold case unit -- only to learn recently that because of funding cuts, the unit was spread thin and had not and would not look at the case.

Now, Hardy's family -- right down to her youngest daughter, Abigail, who was six at the time of her mother's murder and is a much more inquisitive 12 today -- want answers.

"She's aggressive when it comes to this," Barrett said of her granddaughter.

Police "opened Pandora's box," said Barrett. "They gave us so much information over so many years. They told us who murdered our daughter. They told us which people were involved."

But she feels that mistakes were made along the way.

"I have no faith in them," Barrett said of police. "I just have a really bad feeling -- that either there's some sort of cover-up going on" and "they're after bigger fish" or that Hardy's death resulted from work she was doing with a state drug task force and that it's not in law enforcement's interest to solve it.

New Haven State's Attorney Michael Dearington, whose office has been working with Branford police, said he understands why Hardy's family feels the way it does -- but that police are still actively working the case.

"I feel sorry for the Hardy family. I feel very sorry," Dearington said. "But I feel confident that there is going to be an arrest. ... It was a horrible crime and somebody ought to pay.

He said he believes police are closer to an arrest than they were a year or two ago.

"It's good to see cases, especially difficult cases, be solved right away. But that doesn't always happen," Dearington said. "This is not TV."

While there are many things Dearington won't discuss about the case, he did share that "it's more than once or twice a week that I have discussions with the Branford Police Department" about the case. "In fact, even today...

"The fact that it's been that many years, in my opinion does not mean that it's not going to be resolved," he said.

Meanwhile, one of the last people to see Hardy alive, Mark Sachs of Branford -- who family members say had been having an affair with Hardy at one point, although it had ended several weeks before the fire -- was arrested last month in Florida on unrelated cocaine and paraphernalia possession charges.

That case was quickly dropped, according to documents the New Haven Register obtained under the Public Records Act, Florida's equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act.

Sachs could not be contacted to talk about his recent arrest. His brother, Gregory, who also is his lawyer, did not return a call for comment.

Sachs was arrested at a motel in Kissimmee, Fla., Feb. 13, after a glass "crack pipe" containing cocaine residue was found in a coffee maker in his room, according to an Osceola County Sheriff's Office report.

Arrested with him was a 24-year-old Orlando woman with numerous prior arrests, mostly on drug charges but at least two for prostitution-related offenses, according to the police report and other records. The woman, Brandy Wendland, told police she had known Sachs for four days and was visiting him at the motel.

The charges were dropped on March 6, however, after an assistant state attorney reviewed the case and found that it was "not suitable for prosecution" because evidence was insufficient "to prove guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," records show.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, Danielle Tavernier, said it would have been difficult to prove possession of the pipe because the evidence was found in a location that other people had access to.

Branford police previously had said that they wanted to talk to Sachs, an employee of Cherry Hill Construction Co. and a member of the family that owns it, about Hardy. But they had been unable to because his brother had told police that they should only contact Mark Sachs through him.

Mark Sachs, who according to Hardy's family met Hardy for dinner at the Taco Bell on Route 80 in East Haven the evening before the fire, told the Register in 2009 that "it's really a sad situation."

Sachs said he knew Hardy through a childhood friend of his, Charles "Chuck" Talmadge, who Hardy's family members said also was Hardy's on-and-off boyfriend and an employee of Cherry Hill.

Sachs told the Register at the time that Hardy was a good mother who didn't deserve to die, that he would like to see the case solved and would be willing to talk to police -- but they hadn't asked.

But even now, three years after he said that, police have yet to interview Sachs, according to Hardy's family.

Call Mark Zaretsky at 203-789-5722. Follow us on Twitter @nhregister or @markzar. To receive breaking news first, text the word NHNEWS to 22700. *Msg+data rates may apply. Text HELP for help. Text STOP to cancel.